A film no longer has to fit on your device

Until now, playing a torrent meant downloading all of it onto whatever drive you had. A TV box with 2 GB to spare could hold a film or two, and after that every play deleted the last one. A 30 GB remux on a FAT32 stick couldn't be played at all. Ventic can now stream instead: it keeps a few minutes of the film around what is playing, fetches ahead of the picture, gives back what has already played, and deletes the lot when you stop.

Streaming, without downloading the whole film

There is nothing to switch on. Settings → Storage → Playing a torrent starts on Automatic, which decides each film by the drive it would land on:

• A film that fits is downloaded and kept, as before. Ventic makes room by deleting what you watched longest ago, and the film plays offline next time.
• A film that won't fit even then streams. So does every film on a drive with less than 10 GB of room for films, and that covers a TV box's own storage.
• Releases over FAT32's 4 GiB limit play now. They used to be dimmed and couldn't be played. Now they stream from the device's own storage, which has no such limit. Only their Download button is off, and their size shows in red.
• When two releases are otherwise equal, the one that fits wins, so it can be watched again offline.

Stream only, the buffer, and keeping films

• Stream only keeps nothing, on any device. The Download button still fetches the whole film, whatever this is set to.
• Streaming buffer sets how much is kept: 5 minutes ahead of the picture and 2 behind by default. These minutes are worked out at the film's own bitrate and cut down when the device is short on space. More ahead rides out a swarm that slows down. More behind is a rewind that doesn't have to be fetched again.
• Streams go into the app's own cache, not your download folder. Anything a crash leaves there is cleaned up at the next launch.
• While a film streams, the player shows how much is buffered in place of a percentage, and the Downloads page lists it as Streaming.
• Keep films after watching them is a new switch in the same place. It is on by default, which is how Ventic always behaved. Switch it off and a downloaded film is deleted when the player closes, once you have watched it to the end. A film stopped half-way is kept so you can carry on.

Streams that don't stall

A stream can only play as fast as the one piece the player is waiting on, so most of this release's other work is about that piece.

• A slow peer no longer holds up the picture. Peers take whole pieces from anywhere in the buffer, so the piece under the playhead could sit with a peer crawling along at a few KB/s while everything after it arrived. Ventic now takes the next few pieces the player needs away from a slow peer early. On the test TV, after a seek, those pieces used to land 50 seconds late.
• Android waits instead of giving up. The Android player treated a piece that took more than 8 seconds as a dropped connection, and ended the film with "dropped mid-stream" even though the rest of the buffer was already on disk. It now waits for a torrent, as the desktop player always has. A debrid link or a TV channel that stops answering still fails, as it should.
• More peers can reach you on Android and Linux. Ventic now opens a port for incoming peers and asks your router to forward it over UPnP. Before, a peer behind its own home router could never connect, and on the test TV only 3 of about 2000 advertised peers were reachable. This helps only where your router has a public address. It is off on Windows and macOS, where opening the port puts a firewall dialog up at every launch.

Also

• A resumed film never started on some Android TVs. The screen stayed black and showed "Buffering" over a full buffer. The MediaTek video decoder in Philips sets never gave a frame back after a seek, and a resumed film seeks as it opens. The decoder is now fed in a way it copes with.
• Every new setting is translated into all 72 languages.
• Thank you, Hayley, for supporting Ventic on Ko-fi.